David Giles

In Fall 2015, the Brooklyn Public Library’s (BPL) strategy team gained two codirectors, David Giles and Story Bellows—urban innovators with strong backgrounds in government policy. Giles joined the library as chief strategy officer in November 2015, after serving as research director at New York’s Center for an Urban Future (CUF), which in 2014 published Re-Envisioning New York’s Branch Libraries, a report examining the physical and economic challenges facing the buildings that make up New York City’s three library systems. In his new role, he will provide strategic leadership around program development, partnerships, advocacy, and capital planning, among other aspects of BPL’s mission.

Story Bellows

Leading the strategy team with Giles is Bellows, who became BPL’s chief innovation and performance officer in October. Before arriving in Brooklyn, Bellows cofounded and directed the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics in Philadelphia, an in-house research and development lab aimed at supporting innovative approaches to civic problem solving. LJ recently caught up with Giles and Bellows to talk about their previous work, aspirations for BPL, and thoughts on what 21st-century libraries can accomplish. LJ: What was your journey to BPL like? Have you always been a library person? Story Bellows: I wish I could say that I've been a regular library-goer since childhood, but the truth is I haven't. That said, I'm a committed urbanist, and I believe that libraries—both physically and programmatically—play a vital role in the civic health of our communities and our cities. My path here has been far from linear, having lived and worked in London, Chicago, DC, and Philadelphia over the past dozen years. I was trained in city design and social science and bring a variety of experiences contributing to improving the quality of life and the quality of the built environment in cities. David Giles: I’ve long been fascinated with libraries, but until about four years ago, when I came to this issue as a policy researcher at CUF, I had a lot of very old-fashioned ideas about what a library is. I had spent a lot of time in higher education pursuing degrees not directly related to my current profession and absolutely loved being in the stacks among rows and rows of obscure manuscripts. At CUF, we were interested in something like the polar opposite of a research library. We saw value in the collection, obviously, but the library’s most important qualities were its connections to local communities, its openness, and its ability to respond quickly and meaningfully to a wide variety of needs. I worked on a lot of different issues at CUF, but the library issue was special in a lot of ways. It brought a lot of different things together for me policywise, and it was exciting to write about such a rapidly changing field. I’m really excited to be working at a big urban library right now, when there is so much energy and potential in the air. What will the two of you do in your respective roles? What do you expect your biggest challenges to be?  Giles: We’re codirecting a strategy team inside [BPL]. The team does data analysis for the library and manages important pilot projects across a wide variety of departments. We’re just now getting our feet wet, but we’ve been tasked with looking at both operational and public service issues and coming up with new, more effective approaches in both areas. For the last three or four weeks, we’ve been going around interviewing people all over the organization about their jobs and challenges and ideas for the future, so we can start to identify opportunities and create a pipeline of projects that we hope will make BPL a stronger, more effective organization. We’re interested in everything, including capital planning, branch programming, customer experience, advocacy, and more. Bellows: David and I each bring similar passions to the library, from a deeper role for libraries in community development to the importance of design and physical space. I think the combination of skills will translate to us further developing our team as one that supports BPL’s continued leadership as a—if not the—model system for urban libraries. I see my role as supporting the evolution of our organization—breaking down silos and focusing on the intersection of design and data—to ensure that it is as effective and efficient as it can be. In order to do this, we need to create an organization that not only embraces innovation, but requires it. That’s a challenge in public and quasi-public sector organizations, but we need to support risk-taking and the failure that comes with it. Programs like the BKLYN Incubator project [a programming innovation fund for the library] create safe spaces to try new things, and I can imagine pushing that kind of approach much further. We have a great team, and I’m excited to work with them to further develop our capacity around data analytics and human-centered design. What insights and actionable information will you be bringing with you from CUF and the Office of New Urban Mechanics? Giles: At CUF we came to the issue of libraries in a very particular way. We were a think tank focused on how you can grow the economy and expand economic opportunity, so we looked at a wide variety of issues facing the city. We published reports on the lack of diversity in the arts, the need for more skills-based workforce training, low-income entrepreneurship, and the aging of the immigrant population, to name just a few recent topics, and we kept seeing in all these areas that the city’s libraries were playing an important and underappreciated role. In Branches of Opportunity (2013), we set out to document many of the ways public libraries were contributing to these important policy areas and reaching constituents on a daily basis that other institutions and agencies struggle to reach. We wanted to show how libraries were a critical component of New York’s human capital infrastructure and not just a neighborhood amenity or cultural asset. I think there is a lot of hand-wringing both inside and outside (maybe especially outside) the world of libraries about stretching the library mission too far, and though I think there’s a legitimate concern there, particularly when it comes to insufficient funding by government, I also think a broad mission is an institutional strength. Libraries are uniquely positioned to serve a diverse number of communities and constituencies, and there’s an inherent opportunism among librarians, I think, that should be embraced and supported. Christian Zabriskie at the Queens Library and Urban Librarians Unite [and a 2012 LJ Mover & Shaker] recently told me that the library’s response to Hurricane Sandy, which was heroic in many ways (as was BPL’s in South Brooklyn, by the way) was totally unplanned. He said the branch manager at the Far Rockaway library went to her building without permission and basically said, ‘I’m opening, send people to help me if you can.’ That woman’s passion and sense of responsibility for her community flows directly from the library’s broad mission as a builder of communities. I see this at BPL in the outreach librarians who work with prisoners at Riker’s Island and the tech specialists who train teens to become technology resources for our patrons. That BPL allows its employees to challenge traditional notions of what a library is and expand services in sometimes unexpected ways is critically important, I think. One of the important duties for the strategy team going forward will be to empower librarians to do more of this, while at the same time doing more to target services across the library’s 60 branches. Not every library needs the same suite of services. How can we can grow senior services where the seniors are, and young adult services where the young adults are? And how can we do more to discover needs at the local level and respond with the right programs? Bellows: New Urban Mechanics is a great model for supporting innovation in large organizations because it’s networked, it draws support from untapped assets and resources in the community, and it focuses on risk-taking and innovation. These are all approaches that directly apply to the library, where we’re embedded in so many neighborhoods, have great people working across the borough, and have the potential to leverage resources from the amazing talent and experience that exists in Brooklyn. One thing I absolutely believe to be true across all of the communities in which I’ve worked is that people want to work together to improve their communities. I think the local library should serve as a catalyst for that energy, but it also won’t happen by itself. We have to create opportunities for outside organizations to get involved in the life of the library, and we have to empower our staff to find those connections and nurture them. At the end of the day, new processes and programs and policies are all great, but culture is king. New Urban Mechanics didn’t change the culture in the city of Philadelphia, but I believe our partners did. Organizations like Code for America brought new people and thinking into city government, and programs that directly connected entrepreneurs and domain experts led to new projects and collaborations that I never would have designed or imagined. That’s the kind of impact I hope we can have at BPL. It shouldn’t center on the Strategy and Innovation team, it should focus on building an organizational culture in which leaders across the system can build and test and evaluate and redesign and deliver programs that improve the communities we are in. A lot of your work at CUF, David, was devoted to what New York’s library systems are lacking, particularly regarding infrastructure—how do you plan to turn that around to work with and promote BPL’s strengths? Giles: I think the library should continue to shine a light on what it lacks as well as what it could do if it had more resources, particularly when it comes to capital funding. The last budget deal in June was a big step forward in a lot of ways, but there’s still a lot to do and the library needs the continued commitment of the city. In my dream world, there would be the opportunity somewhere down the line to create an ambitious capital campaign with the city putting in a large share and BPL working off of that to raise funds from private sources. With an ambitious investment from the city, we could raise a lot more than we could on our own. The Seattle Public Library did a ton of community engagement and private fundraising for a citywide capital campaign 15 years ago and increased public investment by some 30 percent. Under Mayor Bloomberg, New York very consciously made seed investments in big cultural organizations like Lincoln Center so they could raise even more from donors. So there are precedents to draw from. In the meantime, I’ll be looking for opportunities to build incrementally on the infrastructure we have. Every library in Brooklyn has a community room, for instance, but the vast majority of them lack sufficient furniture and equipment, and the library ends up placing programs in locations based solely on the resources it happens to have rather than where the demand is. In Re-Envisioning New York’s Branch Libraries, CUF had a talented team of designers come up with a kit of parts that could be deployed in a wide range of spaces to create classrooms, group work spaces, and even maker labs. The kit contained stackable chairs and tables and used in some cases overhead wiring to bring more electrical outlets into a space. Insufficient electrical outlets is another big problem in the branches. I would love to find a way to pilot that system somewhere.          What infrastructure opportunities do you see, Story? Bellows: The reach that the Brooklyn Public Library system has across the borough is pretty incredible. It creates huge opportunities for us to explore what it means to have an infrastructure into neighborhoods. How we leverage that physical infrastructure and support the development of deeper networks within and across communities depends, in no small part, on our ability to attract people to our libraries. This requires a physical environment that meets 21st-century needs [for] collaborative problem solving and creative programming. Funding this across the entire system will be a challenge, but we have some great examples of the type of impact we can have in neighborhoods when the library really becomes a center for community learning, and we’re hopeful that we can leverage additional resources to support the continued investment in our infrastructure. An evolving role for libraries is to gather civic data, host hackathons, and generally convene the conversation around communitywide needs and goals. What can and should libraries be doing to make the most impact on their communities? Bellows: I think that libraries need to think about how they support literacy on many fronts, including civic literacy. In recent years, so many new pathways for engagement have emerged, with technology providing a host of opportunities to potentially democratize access. This results in a huge opportunity for libraries, where we can play a leading role to ensure that these new technologies and opportunities for engagement benefit individuals in all communities, not just those with the most resources. Hackathons, charrettes, and public building workshops all provide great opportunities for communities to come together and develop stronger, more impactful relationships, partnerships, and collaborations. I look forward to the library bringing different people and organizations together to test out different engagement strategies and, ultimately, being a catalyst for improving our communities. Giles: I absolutely agree that this is an important direction for libraries. And it’s not just about making libraries more relevant to tech types or even about expanding the libraries’ educational offerings to account for new types of skills—it’s about putting the library back at the center of the civic commons by taking a more active role in discussions around community needs and investments. As Story mentioned, there are a lot of tools we could use to reach that goal. Every time we make significant investments to a building I’d like to see us become a model for how you can engage residents not just in discussions around what a new library should look like, but what it can do going forward to help meet a broader set of community goals. What do you hope CUF or another research entity will ask next about libraries? What questions should librarians be asking themselves? Giles: I’d love for CUF to do something ambitious on libraries and resilience planning. As the sociologist Eric Klinenberg has pointed out, communities need effective public institutions and infrastructure if they are going to bounce back quickly from a crisis. I think there is so much more to learn from the contributions of libraries during times of crisis, and the various ways they contribute over the long term to strong communities. There is a dearth of literature on this topic, and federal, state, and local governments are spending billions of dollars on resiliency and post-disaster recovery efforts. What kind of library do you hope kids growing up now will experience? Bellows: I hope that kids, regardless of the zip code in which they’re born and raised, will see libraries as vibrant centers of community, creativity, culture, and learning. I hope that they’re places of choice. Giles: Public libraries have undergone so many transformations over the last 100 years. At the beginning of the last century, they were civic monuments and temples to learning and self-reliance. During the ’60s and ’70s, they were franchises built around their material collections. Today, like Story, I want them to be places where people can come and build community around shared interests, whether that involves reading or coding or making a business.